Gargoyles: the Resurrection
by Rhapsody Belle
Summary: The Wyvern Clan, lost for over a thousand years through betrayal and brutality. But not lost forever. At the dawning of a new millennium, some will return through fire and blood. Which clan they back, Manhattan or Nightstone, is anyone's best guess.
1. Prologue: Into the Abyss

**Gargoyles: the Resurrection**

**Prologue: Into the Abyss**

_**Castle Wyvern, Scotland**__  
994 AD_

The warning drum for those still in the air sounded above the battlements. An hour til dawn. She looked instinctively to the castle far below her while her wings pumped to keep her aloft. While her attention was diverted elsewhere, the white-haired male she'd been playing air tag with swooped in and tagged her on the back of the head with a gentle blow from his tail. Startled, she spun talons over top, losing a hundred feet of altitude before her wings snapped open and caught her.

She turned a glare flickering with white fire upwards at him, a smirk playing about on her lips.

"You're lucky dawn's coming, _ruadh_!" she called to him, finding a thermal and quickly climbing back up to her previous height. The red male returned her smirk, impossibly wide along his beak, and rolled lazily in the air.

"Ha! You couldn't catch a first-flight hatchling, greenskin," he taunted, mantling his wings to catch the thermal and allow him to hover. She grinned.

"We'll see. A race tonight, then. If the Vikings don't return, like Goliath's mate says they will." Her eyes flicked towards the castle battlements, where the Clan Leader and his scarlet-haired mate were deep in a heated discussion. Even as far as she was into the sky, her eyes were sharp enough to pick out the huge gargoyle and the second-in-command. Her attention was diverted to the side, as a pair of winged shadows passed under them to land in the castle courtyard, and she smiled. "Our rookery brothers seem to brewing trouble."

He grinned and flared his wings. "Still got some time to play left. Think I'll go join them in whatever mischief they're up to."

She laughed and shook her head, and her long brown ponytail whipped in the wind. "You'll end up in the rookery one of these days, _ruadh_," she said with a grin. "You and our brothers, all three of you."

He grinned like a cat and winked. "Gotta get caught first. I'll see you tonight for that race." Flaring his wings, he wheeled and dove towards the courtyard.

She turned and flew towards her typical roosting spot. A small group of her rookery sisters were already there, standing on the battlements and talking amongst themselves with much giggling. She dropped to the battlements, talons scraping gently across the stone as first one foot, then the other touched down. She caped her wings around her, the small handlike talons on each acting as a clasp to keep them together. "Evening, sisters. How goes the night?"

Luckily, it was her two favorite sisters. The small, smoky-skinned and black-haired female was sometimes called Ghost by the humans due to her skill with stealth as well as her coloring. She was standing with her arms folded, her webbed wings draped over her hips and legs, grinning at the other sister. A tall, ivory-skinned beauty, the other sister had a thin tiara of quills sweeping her hair back from her head, delicate wings that were stronger than they looked, and a thick tail with a spade-shaped wedge on the end of it. She could have the males falling all over themselves with the merest flick of her wing struts, and she often did just that, because she could. Ivory was grinning as well as they both turned to her.

"We were just talking about the upcoming mating season," Ivory said. "Our generation is old enough to choose mates and breed the next generation."

She smiled, and let her eyes go back to where the three were teasing the humans in the courtyard. "I know," she replied, and the smile faded into a soft, idiotic kind of thing that Ivory was more prone to do. Abruptly, she blinked, and turned her gaze back to her sisters, only to see the two of them staring at her with smug smirks.

"Chosen a token to exchange with him yet?" Ghost asked, one eye ridge arched in amusement.

"I haven't asked him yet," she replied, and she could feel the blood rushing into her cheeks, darkening her light-green skin to a deep emerald. She cleared her throat and made a show of rearranging her wings about her, dusting invisible specks from her leather halter in the hopes of distracting them. The other two, of course, didn't buy it.

"Uh huh.." There was a slight pause and Ivory continued. "Ghost's got her eye on that olive rookery brother your ruadh is always messing about with. Though, honestly, why you two would want hatchlings as mates is beyond me." Ghost made a protesting sound, ready to defend her choice from Ivory, but the white-skinned gargoyle just pointed towards the courtyard. "Look for yourself, and then try to deny it."

Intrigued, she turned around, noting that Ghost was doing the same. The aqua-green chubby one, the olive one, and ruadh himself were slinking ashamedly towards the rookery, the imposing hulk of the Clan Leader standing solidly behind them with his arms folded, watching them go. She sighed, but couldn't help grinning in bemusement. "I told him he'd end up in the rookery one of these days." She turned back to Ghost and Ivory with a long-suffering look that her smile completely ruined.

"Well... there's always the next season if they're not out in time." Ivory grinned. "And if they are… well, at least you know he's familiar with the rookery, so he'll be able to find it when you're gravid with egg."

Their laughter took them into the sunrise and stone sleep.

oOoOoOo

She was jarred awake suddenly, so suddenly it was disorienting. Sunset was close, she could feel it's approach tingle along the back of her spine. She tried to stretch her wings and limbs, but found she couldn't. She was still locked in stone, alert and aware but unable to move. Panic rose up in her before she squashed it back down. Never had she heard of this happening before. She'd woken before sunset on occasion, but it was the languid half-awake state that came as her stone skin was showing the first fractures, a lazy dreaming state that many gargoyles enjoyed as the sun was finally disappearing beneath the horizon. But never this. Fully awake, before dark, unable to move regardless of how hard she struggled.

She could hear something crunching distantly in the background, outside her stone skin. It distracted her from trying to puzzle out why she was awake but still frozen in her pose. She concentrated as hard as she could, straining her ears as hard as she could. It took her a long few moments to place the sound, and when she did, she went cold, straight to her soul.

Someone was crushing rock.

It had taken her a few minutes to detect the sound, but now it was all she could hear. It came at her from every conceivable angle, the angry, final smashing sound of heavy maces through stone. It filled her head until she was screaming in horror inside. Instinctively she knew that there was only one possible thing anyone would want to break -- the slumbering clan. Her panic swelled again until it mirrored the sound of rock breaking, falling, being smashed, and she couldn't control it. Deep within her frozen sleep-state, she fought like an animal to be free, before the same happened to her.

The first cracks were going through her stone shell, and the part of her that hadn't gone feral with terror and rage rejoiced with a cold sort of savagry. Soon she'd be free to avenge those of her clan who had been treacherously destroyed in their sleep. And then a mace fell, crushing her still-stone shoulder into rubble. She had time to scream once at the white-hot spikes of agony that were shooting through her, before the mace fell again, taking her head from her shoulders and dispatching her soul to the Abyss that was the end of all life.


	2. 1: Nightingale, Part I

**Gargoyles: the Resurrection**

**Nightingale, Part I**

_**Manhattan**__  
1997 AD_

"...eighteen dead, with a dozen more injured, including rescue workers and fire fighters. The blaze was deemed under control at shortly after dark this evening, but continues to defy the efforts of the men and women struggling to douse it entirely. The cause for the blaze is at this point in time undetermined, but investigators suspect a chemical explosion. This is Anita Larousse, Channel 3, Late Night News. Back to you Tom."

Footage of the explosion that had rocked the east side of the island played in the nine television screens in the front window of the electronics store. A small group of people had stopped to watch the images of flames gouting in sheets of angry orange-reds and violent blue-greens, the column of black smoke that rose like a stain against the late afternoon sky and the collapsing buildings as the warehouses burned. Most other people passed the window by, not interested in the media frenzy and sensational speculation that always seemed to follow an explosion these days.

Not of them saw reason to look to the building across the street. Not one of them saw the winged shadow rise from its crouch, eyes burning a startling, furious scarlet. None of them ever looked up, and saw no reason to now. As a result, they missed its leap into the sky.

oOoOoOo

He should be used to it by now. Buildings blowing up, subjects killed, irreplaceably critical research lost... It had happened so often that dealing with such things should be second nature. But it wasn't. And if after all this time if he hadn't developed that attitude, he never would.

Anton Sevarius sat at his desk, one hand idly tapping out an irritated staccato on the surface of the heavy oak desk. Papers lay neatly piled on the corner of the desk, waiting for his attention. He ignored them, knowing that the contents would only mock him. The pages contained what little data he'd managed to save from the fires. Not enough to constitute a launching point for his research, barely enough to begin anew from scratch.

Where others considered him a crackpot, Sevarius considered himself an artist and performed his research and experiments accordingly. Every gene was a color, every DNA strand a different hue to shade in the lines of his newest development. He was painter and sculptor both, and he took pride in what he did. He took the cracks and flaws inherent in nature's creations and smoothed them out, filled them in, filed them down. In his hands, it became perfect. And it was always a crushing letdown to admit that, once again, his work had been ruined by circumstances beyond his control.

Like this most recent occurrence.

He sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose between his right forefinger and thumb. His employer would be most unhappy to learn of this latest disaster, and while it wasn't likely to come out of his princely paycheck -- not if his employer wished to retain his services in future endeavors -- it just might come out of his hide. If he could get his hands on the technician in the chem labs that had mixed the wrong solutions together... Hopefully the idiot had died in the initial explosion and thusly removed himself from the gene pool. Stupidity often bred true, and the last thing the world needed was another moron child spawned by an incompetent imbecile.

The phone shrilled on the desk, jarring Sevarius out of his brooding, fuming thoughts. His shoulders tensed as it rang again, before they slumped and he slowly reached to answer it.

The moment the phone cleared the cradle, he could already hear the epithets and curses being thrown at him in several languages, with a good deal of heat behind them. He gingerly put the phone to his ear, and let the other side carry on for a bit, before interrupting the tirade. The sheer tiredness in his voice thickened his accent. "Ja, ja ... I know. Deafening me vill solve nothing."

The swearing ebbed and finally stopped, and there was only silence for a moment. A question was asked. "It's possible, yes. .... Of course I didn't wait around to make sure! ... Vhat do you take me for, a common lab assistant? .... I don't know what to suggest. No, I don't have my research vith me. They're still alive? They escaped. ... How could I...?" His eyebrows went up. "How do you expect me to do that?" He listened for another moment, before sighing. "_Jawohl_. It vill be done."

He hung up as a second tirade was starting and rubbed at both temples. That was all he needed. Research gone, his tinkering and recoloring half-finished, and the subjects roaming around _weeks_ before they had been ready to be deemed fit for field testing. As if that hadn't been bad enough. Now he was expected to shoulder the blame for the incident, and find his errant experiments.

_Wunderbar._

An already long day stretched out impossibly longer before him as he reached for the phone again, and placed a call.

oOoOoOo

Brooklyn caught the warm thermal rising from the street and climbed the sky, adjusting his wings and attitude until he was evenly gliding above the lower East side. He was supposed to be checking on the progress of the fire that had started there earlier, clandestinely aiding in the rescue attempts should the opportunity arise, but he couldn't shake the dream he'd had last night. It turned him inward, brooding, musing even, and he knew he was lucky he hadn't flown headfirst into a skyscraper.

He'd dreamed of her as he'd been slumbering in his stone sleep. Gargoyles didn't often dream, but when they did, or at least when he did, it was as vivid as if it had actually happened. Even when they *did* dream, they rarely dreamed of events that had happened. He wasn't sure why this particular memory had surfaced, but it had. And it disturbed him. He'd thought he'd put it aside, buried it deep, forgotten about it.

Apparently, he hadn't.

Just by thinking about it, the memory rose again, as vivid as if it had occurred five minutes ago.

_She was looking elsewhere, not paying attention to him, held aloft by the labouring downstrokes of her wings. He took a moment to study her profile from a short distance. High cheekbones and a pert nose. Fair green skin the exact color of grass beneath a summer's full moon and brown hair that was both thick and luxuriant tied back in a pony tail. She wore a leather halter and a short belted loincloth which revealled a long stretch of trim and toned torso. On the ground she moved with grace, but in the air she was a true skydancer. Even hovering as she was, every line in her body was held with perfect balance and precision. _

_So of course, he couldn't resist. _

_He dove towards her, spun midair and bapped her on the back of the head with his tail. Startled, she fell from the sky, and there was a bad, heartstopping moment when he thought that she might plummet completely out of the air. He was in the process of adjusting his wings to dive after her in the hopes that he could catch her when her own wings snapped open and she called out something in a mock-threatening tone, something about him being lucky it was near dawn. _

_He grinned and curved his wings to allow the thermal to keep him aloft for a moment. "You couldn't catch a first-flight hatchling, greenskin!" he'd retorted, and tried to ignore the effect her smirking brown eyes were having on him. Or that return grin of hers, which caused his stomach to knot up. Or her scent, light and smelling faintly of heather, which filled his nose and set his thoughts whirling. He hoped she wasn't going to require him to come up with anything witty, because he didn't think he could out-retort a just-laid egg at the moment._

_"We'll see," she said. "A race tonight, then. If the Vikings don't return, like Goliath's mate says they will." She glanced towards the castle, and smiled. He didn't know about a race after the sun had set once again, but his heart was racing right now. So fast it might explode. Idly, he wondered if he knew the effect she had on him, and figured she probably did. Females were sneaky like that._

_She said something about their rookery brothers and trouble, and he glanced down briefly, in time to see his two usual partners-in-chaos landing neatly in the center of the courtyard. Still not sure what he was saying, he grinned and shot off something about joining them while there was still time to play. He had no idea of the end of the conversation - something about them all ending up in trouble, and something about them having to get caught first._

_When he landed in the courtyard still with her warm smile in his mind's eye, her laughter in his ears and her scent in his nostrils, he got a pair of smug looks from his brothers. The smaller one grinned and nudged him with his elbow. "Got a token picked out yet?" _

_He flushed maroon, and spluttered as they laughed. Finally, he managed to draw himself up with some sense of dignity, though he could still feel the blood heating his cheeks. "Yes," he replied tartly. "For your information, I do."_

_There had been more good-natured ribbing before the humans had interrupted them, and everything had gone downhill from there. They'd been sent to the rookery, just as she had predicted he would be. The next night... _

The next night, he'd stood where she roosted and with tears flowing unashamedly down his cheeks, he'd held the shattered remains of his beloved in his hands, and mingled his howl with the howl of his brothers and leader as they wept over the broken stone of their clan.

Brooklyn shook out of it for the hundredth time that night, and was somewhat startled to see that he'd already overflown the site of the fire by at least fifteen minutes. He cursed, turned on a wingtip and started to head back. This far from downtown, there weren't many buildings that rose above fifteen stories, but there were a couple scattered here and there. He was skimming the shadowed roof of one of them when he heard it.

A whispering voice drifted on the wind, sounding lost and alone and confused. Brooklyn tilted his head, and wheeled around again. Silently, his foot-talons touched down on the gravel of the roof, and he caped his wings around him. Padding quietly across the roof, he tracked the sound to its source.

"...live to protect... protect... we protect..." Like a mantra, the word _protect_ kept cropping up in the rambling mutters his keen ears caught. He stalked through the shadows of the various protrusions, naught more than a shadow himself. He'd almost passed by the slim figure hunched into herself, shielded by darkness, before his nose caught the faint scent of heather and gargoyle. His head spun, and his senses reeled. _I'm going crazy... she's dead. I dreamed of her, and that's the only reason I'm seeing and smelling things._

The green gargoyle sat up, and her eyes flashed white around the edges. In the backsplash of light, Brooklyn caught sight of silver jewelry at left wrist, right ankle, throat and upper right arm, dark leathers and green skin. High cheekbones and claw-tipped wings.

He reeled backwards, hands coming up and denials spilling from his mouth. "No," he breathed. "You're dead..."

She jumped and stumbled backwards, pressing herself against the brick wall in sheer terror. A high-pitched scream tore itself from her throat, and her eyes were reminiscent of deer-in-headlights. Brooklyn had never understood what that had meant until this moment.

He forced himself to take a step forward, though his nostrils were still flaring instinctively to catch as much of her scent as possible. It was her. It couldn't be her. She was dead. She was back. He had to try four times before he could get a word past the lump in his throat. Either he was going crazy, or by some insane miracle, she was back. "Easy greenskin," he said softly, bringing his arms down in a gesture that was supposed to be calming. "I'm not going to hurt you. Do you remember me?"

She froze and blinked owlishly, coming slightly away from the wall with all the grace and litheness he remembered her having. When she spoke, her voice was shaky and husky. It quavered on the syllables of a name he hadn't heard in over a thousand years.

"_Ruadh_?"

"My nightingale," he breathed, and he reached out to her with a quickness he couldn't stop. Neither could he help the joy that filled him to capacity, and that damned lump was back in his throat. Whatever thin, tenebrous connection he held to her snapped at the sudden movement, and the panic was back in her eyes.

"No! Leave me alone!" Holding her head in her hands, she ran straight for the edge of the roof, leapt onto it and pushed off with one foot, her wings snapping open to catch the winds from the water. With a shriek of pain, confusion and terror, she dropped out of sight.

Brooklyn cried out something wordless, and raced to the edge of the building. His talons slipped in the gravel, and he hit the low stone wall surrounding the roof, nearly pitching over into thin air. Only a desperate thrust of his talons through the side of the building kept him from plunging to the streets to splatter across the asphalt. His eyes blazed twin coronas of white light that flashed into the dark corners of the alleyway below him.

She was gone without a trace.

oOoOoOo

**Author's Note**: I had one message about this already, but I'd like to reassure any future readers that yes, this fic was posted a long time ago on Gargoyles-Fans (dot) Org. It was never finished, but rest assured, the original author myself are, in fact, one and the same person.

I'm finishing up this fic as and when I can, as the story has recently re-interested me, and I'm posting it here, instead of on GFO, as I much prefer the format of FFN.

Plus, I can't remember my password over there. -.-


	3. 2: Nightingale, Part II

**Gargoyles: the Resurrection**

**Nightingale, Part III**

_**Somewhere Outside of Space And Time**_

_She had floated in the darkness for an age, curled around herself with all of her limbs, floating as if she'd been in the shell once again. Time had no meaning here, nor did space. There was only the numbing cold that leached away her desires, her memories, her very will. At first she had fought it, fought it with fang and talon, struggling to remember. Struggling to feel. Struggling to not give in and float in the numbing void around her. She didn't know how long she'd kept it up – a millennium or a split second in time. But eventually, given enough time, the Abyss would creep into the hearts of those who had come here and steal away, one breath at a time, that which made them alive. _

_She supposed it really didn't matter, really. All time was one here. And she no longer cared enough to want to know how long she'd held ground from the Abyss. She was content enough, after a fashion, to float along lost in her own maudlin and fading thoughts. Occasionally, images swirled murkily at her, blurred and skewed memories, she supposed. People and places she'd known before this. But what did it matter to her anymore? The images had once had the power to snap her out of the white noise for short periods. As time went on, the images, the _memories _began to lose their potency, began to lose their power over her. Now, it was all but destroyed._

_She let the hazy and dream-like blurs of pastel colors drift past her mind's eye, turning her attention back to nothing in particular. She was bothered by her lethargy on some abstract level, but she knew she wasn't going anywhere. Perhaps this is why her kind generally didn't believe in a life after death. This was no life. She wasn't even sure she was dead. This… this was a grey, devoid, colorless, bleak and depressing place. If she still had been capable of concern, she'd be worried about her sanity by now. _

_The images whirled softly in the back of her mind. Occasionally, she twitched. Just slightly, but still more than she had moved in quite a long time. Or perhaps it was a short time. It was hard to measure that which had no meaning, after all. _

_The quiet whirling in the back of her mind moved forward to be an irritating buzzing sound, like the high-pitched whine of a mosquito looking for somewhere to land and bite. She didn't know where that analogy came from. Irritably, she flicked an ear, and a fine powder of dust sifted slowly from the tip of her lobe to sparkle in thin air and dissipate slowly. _

_The feeling grew stronger, and with it grew her irritation. She raised her head from her knees and looked around. She saw nothing but what she had been seeing since she had gotten here. It was mind-breaking, the void… But now something was sparkling in the distance … if space and distance had relevance. The last remnants of curiosity blazed to life in her heart, and she squinted, trying to determine what it was._

_She didn't have to wait long, before the glittering, sparkling _thing_ was upon_

_her. A half-remembered feeling of confusion and wariness built in her as she tried to back away from the shimmering sash of light that wrapped around her. Distantly, she heard a voice chanting, rising and falling in volume. The confusion and wariness built up into all-out panic as the dust-mote light tightened around her, and began pulling her from her cold, listless, emotionless and painless existence into a world of agony and doubt, fear and incomprehension._

_She screamed as she felt something tear free from her, and sheets of white-hot pain washed over her in waves. Her vision went scarlet, then white, then black. By the time it returned, she was being shoved unmercifully into something that was familiar in shape, but dim and uncomfortable, crowded, with not enough room for her to fit. She struggled and fought against the imprisoning, shrieking with a rediscovered fury and all the strength she could muster. But it wasn't enough. The entrance to the prison was slammed shut, locked, and bound with the strongest bands of iron and magical protections. She railed against it all, beating at the exit with her fists_

_and feet, screaming madly, but it was to no avail. _

_Something from the dark reached up and drew her down, down into the blackest reaches of the pit. She had time for one more shriek before she faded out of_

_consciousness._

oOoOoOo

**Castle Wyvern, Aerie Building**

_August 21, 1997 AD_

"I'm telling you, it was her!"

Lexington patted his arm and smiled patronizingly. "Suuuure. Of course it was, Brook," he agreed sarcastically, turning back to his computer screen. "Your dead girlfriend, a thousand years gravel and dust, suddenly showing up in the middle of a Manhattan fire. Forgive me for doubting you. Next you'll be telling me you've flown her and have eggs on the way. She's dead, Brooklyn. Gravel, dust, rock. You couldn't even grit an icy walkway with her remains she's so dead."

Brooklyn saw red, and yowled in fury. He had his small brother yanked out of the chair and up by the neck against the wall before he was more than half-aware he'd moved. His eyes blazed with white rage, and his voice snarled from between gritted teeth. "Don't you ever," punctuating the word with a slam against the wall, "_ever_ talk about her like that again!"

Lexington scrabbled at the wall with his feet, hands trying desperately to pry Brooklyn's claws from his throat. He snarled back, own eyes flashing white, and raked his foot claws down Brooklyn's thigh. Blood welled, and the red gargoyle howled in pain, releasing his hold on his smaller sibling. Lexington dropped coughing and wheezing to all fours, rubbing at his throat and glaring at Brooklyn.

"Jesus, Brook! What's gotten into you?"

Brooklyn, feeling nothing but the pain from the sluggishly-bleeding talon rips in his thigh and still in the grip of anger, lashed out with a claw that came within a hairsbreadth of slicing through Lexington. His return strike was aborted when a huge, dusk-colored fist caught his wrist in an unforgiving grip. Goliath's voice, laced through with supreme irritation, rumbled into his ears.

"Enough!"

With an ease of motion, he threw Brooklyn to the other side of the room, and he ricocheted off the wall with a grunt. Catching himself before he was dumped face first onto Xanatos' disgustingly plush, thousand-dollar-a-foot carpet, he rubbed at the back of his head and glared.

Lexington was still on all fours, massaging his throat, slightly behind and to the right of Goliath. The clan leader was eyeing Brooklyn in a manner that crushed his anger and snapped him back to his senses. With deliberate carefulness, he folded his wings about him, and crossed his arms.

"Now," Goliath said in a tone that brooked no argument, "explain to me what this was all about."

Brooklyn slumped down onto the ground, wings and tail and shoulders drooping.

Haltingly, he began to explain to Goliath what -- who -- he had seen earlier. He meant only to mention the new gargoyle who bore an eerie resemblance to his dead rookery sister, but everything came spilling out. The stone dream, the fire, his inner turmoil, and how confused, how _frightened, _the female gargoyle had been.

Goliath listened without interruption, then set a hand on his second's shoulder as Brooklyn trailed off his story, then broke down and wept like a hatchling.

oOoOoOo

_**Manhattan, Lower East Side**_

_Later_

She shivered, and drew herself tighter, wrapping her arms around her shoulders, her head bowed miserably. The wind hissed at her, carrying the smell of burning chemicals and soot to her nose, and even a few buildings away, she could feel the heat roiling from the flames that the people in the streets were trying so desperately to put out.

_What happened? Did I... do that? I... can't remember...What do I remember?_

She remembered pain, and voices. Sharp objects poking her here and there. A

confusing babble of images that flickered through her mind faster even than she could follow even with her thoughts.

_"Subject 001-Z4. Motor functions normal, brain activity optimal. Call up the training programs, and give it another session."_

She remembered glass shattering, and a whoosh like water gushing over smooth rocks. An inhuman howl of pain and rage, maybe from her throat, maybe from another's. A doubled fist raised high above her before smashing through a panel of some sort. Sparks flying into the air before the thing she'd broken exploded with a rush of air that threw her back against the wall, with enough force that it knocked the wind out of her. More explosions from farther away, and the panicked yells her keen hearing picked up effortlessly. Clawing her way through a wall to find herself in a maze of hallways, terror overtaking her as she blindly smashed through walls and doors until she found a window. Wings snapping to either side and the sweet breeze that washed over her.

_"Help me! Oh Jesus Christ, someone help me!"_

A man cut off from escape by a solid wall of flame inside a building whose roof had already partially collapsed, his clothing starting to smoulder. His screams of hopelessness and despair. The overwhelming urge to protect him. Dropping into the flames and tossing him over her shoulder. Clawing up the wall and unfurling her wings to catch the winds the buildings were tossing back and forth between themselves. Flying the man to safety, with him gibbering in terror in her ear. Depositing him on the roof of a building several hundred yards away from the fire. Three-quarters of the way back to the disaster zone before she even thought about what she was doing.

Over and over again, she mumbled something about living to protect, all the while curling in on herself, her wings coming around to cover her, pressed into the shadows. She shivered, and muttered, and then a voice cut into her ramblings. "No...You're dead..."

She leapt to her feet, and pressed herself against the brick of the outcropping behind her. A monster had appeared, directly in front of her. Red skin, blazing eyes and devils horns against a shock of white hair. A long tail, and demon wings, tipped with tiny hands.

_No! Stay away!_

It was on her lips to scream her thought, when something started niggling at the back of her head. Recognition, of a sort. Familiarity. An eerie sense of timelessness and an out-of-place sensation that crept along the base of her spine and ran through her wings. She came away from the wall, tentatively reaching out a tri-fingered hand, and shakily whispered the name that had come with the recognition. "_Ruadh_?"

He breathed something and jerked forward. Agony crashed down on her, spiking through her head and flaring like fire along all her nerve endings. She shrieked for him to get away and ran blindly towards the edge of the roof, her throbbing head held in both hands. She leapt to the small half-wall on the brink of the fifteen-story drop to the streets below, and jumped. Her wings dragged at the air, until they caught, and she whipped around on the current into an alley. Her speed more than she could handle, she crashed into a Dumpster, and the lid banged shut. The noise was lost, even to her, in the general babble of chaos and confusion from the fire.

She huddled in there for what seemed like forever, before the tingle in the base of her neck and along her wing struts. Again a sense of familiarity rose in her, but this one was instinct, not memory. She knew, somehow, she had to get to high ground, a safe place, before the sun rose. Biting back sobs, she pushed against the lid of the metal box, and drove her claws into the side of the building.

Her higher thought processes shut down, she flew by instinct, racing the sun to find the highest, most defensible spot she could in the amount of time she had. Landing on a church steeple, she curled into a recessed section of the roof, and brought her over and around her. It was almost like she was in the egg again, oddly comforting. As she huddled there, waiting for the sun to rise, her thoughts turned to trying to sort out the confusion. A silent tear slid down her cheek as she tried again and again to figure out who she was and why she was here, and that's when the sun took her.

When the first light of dawn reached the steeple of St. Michael the Archangel's church a moment later, it was to reveal another statue amid the dozens of gargoyles and grotesques that decorated the roof.


	4. 3: Nightingale, Part III

**Gargoyles: the Resurrection**

**Nightingale, Part III**

_**Nightstone Unlimited**_

_August 22, 2004_

_6:03am_

Danica Kaine was enjoying a rare moment of rest when the news broke about the fire at a laboratory belonging to rival corporation Majix Technologies. She paid it little heed until her ear chanced to hear mention of a gargoyle sighting, and then her moment of rest was over.

Danica prided herself on being the best, of being indispensible. Of knowing exactly what her employer not only needed but _wanted_ before they did. Minutes after the news broadcast about the explosion, and the follow-up story that came after showing some very shaky handcam footage of a blurry winged shape moving across the sky, Danica placed a call from her office phone, texted from her cell phone while she was waiting, and emailing half a dozen people while she talked after the call was picked up.

Three hours later, she was rewarded for her labors with a ream of information on Majix Technologies and their recent projects, including one extremely classified document code-named Project Lazarus. The files were encrypted, the boys in Acquisitions told her, with some pretty severe security protocols. Which should be nothing to the crack team of hackers Nightstone legally employed, if they ever got off their donut-swilling asses and did what they were paid to do.

She made her way through the halls of the upper levels of the Nightstone Building, heels clicking importantly on the marble-tiled floor, a briefcase in one hand and a fat file folder in the other. There weren't many people up and about this hour of the morning, mostly janitorial staff, but those that were quickly and efficiently got out of her way with respectful, even slightly fearful, nods.

It was nice being the personal assistant for the CEO and founder of the company, Danica reflected as she stepped into the mirrored private elevator leading up to Ms. Destine's penthouse office. Dominique wasn't the first CEO to employ her, nor probably would she be the last. But so far, this was the only job that

"Good morning, Ms. Destine," Danica said respectfully, and stood patiently until her boss gave her the nod over her morning cup of coffee to take the seat opposite her own at the desk. She sat, smoothed her skirt over her knees, and gently laid the file folder on the corner of the desk.

"Good morning, Ms. Kaine," Dominique replied, and took another sip of her coffee. Danica could smell the blend from where she was sitting, Jamaican Blue Mountain. Only the best and priciest for Ms. Destine, but she had to admit, her one taste of the blend had sent her straight to heaven, so she couldn't fault her boss there. Her system quietly let her know that it needed a caffeine jolt, but Danica would never be so crass and impertinent to ask for a cup of Dominique's rare and expensive coffee.

"If I know you," Dominique continued, swiveling to stare out through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the sunrise creeping over the Manhattan skyline, "and I wouldn't have hired you if I didn't, you've discovered some very important tidbit which you know is in my interests."

"Yes, Ms. Destine," Danica said dutifully, and reached for the file folder she'd put down mere moments ago. She flipped it open and pulled out several pages, quickly scanning the information to ensure she had the proper file and information. "Late last night, there was an explosion at the Majix Technologies laboratory on the Lower East Side," she said, and offered the pages to Dominique. Her boss raised an eyebrow, but took the document and lowered her gaze to it as she took another drink of her coffee. Danica fell respectfully silent as her boss perused the pages. This would be so much faster if she could just lay out all the facts at once, but Dominique rarely had the patience for rush jobs.

"Interesting enough," Dominique finally said when she was done reading, and set the document aside. "Hardly within your job description though."

It was the opening she'd been waiting for. She quickly revised her mental outline of the information to be presented, and discarded several items. "That would normally be true, Ms. Destine," she said and rifled through the pages to pull out a grainy black-and-white image captured from the home-movie footage played by the news outlets. She examined it for a brief moment: it was nothing special, merely a winged shadow against the half moon. She offered it to her employer anyway. "Except for this."

Dominique took the page out of her hand and glanced it over. Her gaze sharpened, her entire body tensed – like a hunter, came the uncomfortable thought in the back of Danica's mind, which she ruthlessly pushed away – and carefully set down her mug. "The news mentioned a gargoyle in conjunction with the lab explosions?"

"Yes, Ms. Destine." Danica pulled several more documents from the file folder, and laid them out in order facing Dominique. "There were multiple eyewitness reports of a gargoyle swooping in to badly damaged sections of the buildings and ferrying people to safety. A lot of the accounts are garbled, and several of the eyewitnesses are questionable at best, with having had such a traumatic event occur, of course, but enough exist, along with photographic evidence, that there were not just one gargoyle, but _several _gargoyles present after the lab explosion."

Dominique looked sharply up, piercing Danica with her eyes. "If the stories are to be believed," she said, deceptively mildly – Danica had been around long enough to know her employer's tones and moods – "there is already a nest of gargoyles in the city that often undertake such heroic acts as saving victims from harm."

Danica had anticipated this line of questioning, and had taken the liberty of doing some of her own fact-checking. She pulled yet another series of images from the folder and lined them up. "I thought of that as well, ma'am," she said, "and made a few inquiries before I brought this to your attention. I know how valuable your time is, after all. The image that you're holding does not meet the physical proportions of any of the gargoyle images recorded prior to last night. The footage was not of a particularly desirable quality, however, so there is a margin of error."

Dominique's eyebrow only raised further. "Does not meet?" she said wonderingly, then shook her head. "How much of a margin of error, Danica?"

"Eighty-three percent accurate, ma'am. It isn't a perfect guarantee by any means, but the chances are very, very good that the gargoyle so many reported seeing or being helped by last night is a newcomer to the city."

Dominique was silent for a very long time, and Danica resisted the urge to fidget. She watched her boss completely forget her coffee was running cold (and there was nothing Dominique hated more at six in the morning than a cold, wasted cup of coffee) as she read in-depth the package Danica had put together for her. Dominique's facial expressions ran the gamut from surprised to thoughtful to wistful to determined over the course of the next ten minutes, at the end of which she finally put the folder down and nodded at Danica.

"You've done an exemplary job with these files, Danica," she praised, and Danica felt pride surge within her. "I do notice, however, that there are at least a dozen encrypted files you managed to … acquire from Majix Technologies. Most of them dealing with this Project Lazarus…"

"Yes ma'am," Danica replied, and couldn't keep the pleased smile from her face. "I've already made sure that the specialists on the fifth floor are aware of the importance of these files. I sent down a request a little less than an hour ago for it to be made a priority by the teams."

Dominique neatly placed all the scattered pages and images into the folder again, and dropped it in her top drawer, leaving only the grainy image of the unknown gargoyle sitting on her desk. "Thank you for your attention to this project, Danica," Dominique said warmly. "You, with your work ethic and drive, have shown yourself to be an indispensible boon to this company. Effective immediately, I'm giving you a ten percent raise to your salary for your insightfulness and incentive. "

Danica had been hoping for a minor increase; ten percent nearly floored her. But she wasn't such an idiot that she wouldn't take it with grace and dignity. Ten percent extra would go a long way to establishing her lifestyle properly. She smiled and bowed her head. "No, thank _you, _Ms. Destine. Your generosity is always appreciated."

"Was there anything further, Danica?"

Danica shook her head and gathered her things. She knew dismissal when she heard it, but the ten percent raise outweighed any irritation she might have felt. "No, Ms. Destine. I'll be sure to keep an eye on the news outlets, to see if there's any further coverage of the gargoyle sightings."

Dominique smiled at her, and once again Danica felt a surge of accomplishment. "Be sure to see Rolanda in Personnel about your raise," she murmured, and picked up both her cup of coffee and the file Danica had left on her desk.

Danica reeled out the door and fairly floated all the way back down to her office, dreaming of ten percent extra cars, clothing and apartment furnishings.

oOoOoOo

**Church of St. Michael the Archangel**

_Sunset, 7:43pm_

Father Robert O'Brien had been the pastor of St. Michael the Archangel for nigh on twenty years. He had seen births and deaths aplenty, presided over weddings and funerals and christenings without number. He walked every inch of his church a thousand times over in his two decades of being its caretaker, and watched the sun set over the city from the roof of the church nearly every day.

So when his instincts told him that one of the gargoyle statues on the roof of his sanctuary had not been there the night before, he knew to listen.

He leaned on his cane to ease his bad right leg, the persistent remnant of a war wound taken back when he'd been a young padre in Saigon, and pensively studied the unknown statue. He had a pretty good idea of how it had gotten onto the roof without his knowing; if it was a true gargoyle, flesh by night, it was as simple a matter as finding safety before the sun came up.

The gargoyle was female, though that was hard to discern from the way the wings wrapped protectively around her body. Something in the lines of the face, he decided finally, a slender delicacy to the cheek bones and jaw lines that suggested feminism.

It never occurred to him to believe that he was the victim of some unfathomable prank, finding a strange statue atop his roof. Though he'd never met a gargoyle previously, he'd seen enough winged shadows crossing the sky to believe in them. He didn't fall in with the fools in the city that thought gargoyles were something evil to be feared and hunted. Rome knew that gargoyles were protectors, those who kept demons away from their homes; if it had been otherwise, representations of gargoyles and their cousins, the grotesques, would never have been commissioned by the Church for their holy houses.

The last light of the setting sun washed over the roof, stretching long shadows nearly to the doorway on the other side. Father O'Brien shifted his weight again, grimacing slightly as the ever-present twinge in his leg bothered him once again. He rubbed briskly at his thigh, trying to ease the ache as the sun disappeared and twilight fell.

The first pop and crack of stone breaking made him jump, and he hissed in pain as he landed on his bad leg. Only by leaning heavily on his cane did he manage to keep his balance. Then, he leaned forward, intently and interestedly studying the cracks as they ran jaggedly across the surface of the gargoyle's statue.

He only hoped he didn't scare the creature into tossing him off the roof before he had a chance to introduce himself.

oOoOoOo

With sunrise had come blessed oblivion. With sunset came consciousness and the healing of every scrape, scratch and scorch she'd suffered the night before. She roared, exulting in the feeling of being awake and freed from stone sleep, stretching every limb and both wings to their fullest extent. A moment later, the feeling fled, replaced by a creeping dread as she stared out over the unfamiliar and alien cityscape.

She crouched low and clutched at the edge of the roof, trying to pull her fractured memories together. A place of strange machines and odd men. A fire. People in need of rescue. A maddeningly familiar red gargoyle. And then the sunrise. Then more that came, a veritable flood of memories from a time long ago, a time she wasn't even sure she remembered properly. A castle, a wide expanse of virgin wood and wilderness. A princess, the guards. More gargoyles in a rainbow of color. Feelings associated with each one threatened to swamp her and take her into oblivion once more.

She whimpered and clutched her head between both hands as the memories poured through her mind. Desperately, she tried to exert some control, to build a mental dam through which only a little could trickle at a time, but that control kept slipping. That dam kept crumbling under the onslaught.

"Hello there," came a soft voice from behind her.

Instantly, she whirled, her eyes ablaze and her claws extended, her wings and tail flaring out to balance her on the narrow stone edge of the roof. A man with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing black with a white collar and leaning on a cane, stood very still with one hand raised, palm first. She hesitated for a moment, trying to assess if he was a threat or not. But it was so hard to think straight with her head pounding and screaming at her.

"I have no intentions of hurting you," the man continued in a soft, soothing tone. She held her stance a moment longer, then warily relaxed. The human was crippled, she told herself. _Like Brother Mathias_, a memory whispered, bringing with it the image of a fat, jolly man in a friar's habit with a crutch. She winced, one hand going to her head again.

"I'm Father O'Brien. Robert," the human added, then took a cautious step forward. The hand he'd been holding up to show he was unarmed extended out towards her. "You look in pain. Perhaps I can help."

"What are you doing here?" she snarled, eyeing the extended hand but not reaching out to take it.

"I'm the pastor of this church," Robert replied, and didn't seem to bat an eye at her hostility. Nor did he lower his hand from where it was still reaching out to her. She had to give him credit for his courage.

"The priest. Responsible for seeing to the spiritual and physical wellbeing of my parishioners."

"_I'm Brother Mathias, lady gargoyle," the man in the brown robe with the crutch told her, and his eyes danced merrily. "A friar assigned here by Holy Rome to see to the spiritual well-being of Wyvern's residents. They didn't specify if those residents in need of spiritual guidance needed to be human. Did you want to come to my first midnight mass this evening?"_

She staggered back a pace as the memory steamrolled through her, but her foot met only air. Thrown off-balance, she fought a losing battle for balance. Before she could tip backwards, however, Robert had taken three quick paces forward and caught her wheeling arm, pulling her back to balance again. He released her wrist as soon as she was steady again, and returned to his distance of three paces.

She stared at him, and he stared back, a look a touch more polite than the one she was sure she was giving him. "Thank you," she murmured finally, and caped her wings around her shoulders. Prudently, she took one step forward, off the stone edge. Just in case.

"May I ask your name, lady gargoyle?"

"_May I ask your name, lady gargoyle?" the fat friar asked. _

_She laughed. "We don't have names like you humans do, unless you humans give us those names, like Goliath, or Bethsabe. …There is one among us that calls me _nightingale. _You may call me that if you wish, Brother Mathias._"

She closed her eyes briefly against the spike of pain that came with the remembrance. "Nightingale," she managed through gritted teeth. "I'm called Nightingale."

The man – _Robert_ – smiled warmly. "Well, Nightingale," he said. "It is a pleasure to meet you." He hesitated for a moment, and she tensed, wondering if this was the moment the attack would come. But he merely tilted his head and in a tone as concerned as any she'd ever heard asked, "Would you like to come inside the church? I have warm food and tea to share, if you're hungry."

She was hungry, she realized suddenly as her stomach growled at the mere mention of food. "I am," she admitted. "You really have no intention of trying to hurt me, do you?"

"Not in the slightest," he said with a small smile and a gesture towards the door on the other side of the roof. "I'm not in the habit of hurting people. I'm a man of God, my dear, not a Quarryman."

"What's a Quarryman?" she asked curiously as he led her into the warmth of the church.

oOoOoOo

Demona sighed in relief as the pain of her forced transformation faded away to a dull ache that would disappear entirely once she indulged in a hot shower. She stretched her wings and tail, then settled herself back down at her desk and reached for her coffee cup and the file her very efficient personal assistant had given her more than twelve hours ago.

She had read it at least a dozen times already, fact-checking through her private channels even her top-level executives, let alone her PA, knew existed. As far as she'd been able to verify, the lab had been doing research into cloning and reanimation, amongst other fringe sciences. Any more than that required codebreakers and hackers. Once Acquisitions cracked the encryptions on the Lazarus files, however, she'd know the full extent of Majix Technologies' research and development.

Demona finished her coffee and studied the grainy still of the gargoyle, cleaned up and enhanced as much as computers allowed for. Details weren't clear, but Demona recognized in the slimness of the wing structure and limbs that the gargoyle was female. There was something about the tail, barely visible as a silhouette against the night sky, that niggled at Demona's most ancient and foggiest of memories, something about the wing structure.

She leaned back in her chair, rubbing her chin as she mulled it over. There had been countless gargoyles over the long centuries of her life she had known, from the original Wyvern Clan to the scattered band of refugees she had led in the waning years of her first lifetime. Clans from Paris, London, the Orient… they all blended together after so long in memory.

The original Wyvern clan…

With a start, Demona whirled in the chair and snatched the photo off her desk again. Yes! That was it! The light hue of the gargoyle wasn't a trick of the light like she'd originally thought. It was the gargoyle's natural color: pure ivory as presented in a black-and-white image! And the tail… she'd only known one gargoyle with light skin to ever have a spade shaped tail. The trio of quills, easy to dismiss as a more common "hand" midway along the wingstruts only cinched it.

"You," she breathed, staring at the photo in disbelief. She gently touched the picture, smoothed her talons over the indistinct face. "I remember you. Ivory, they called you."

With a sense of purpose, she tucked the photograph back into the folder and put the entire file into a locked drawer of her desk. She strode to the full-length window and flung it open, feeling for the first time the night breeze against her skin and wings. She launched herself out of the window, catching a thermal almost instantaneously, and angled her path to take her downtown, to where the last reports of gargoyle sightings had been.

She dared not let herself get too attached to the hope starting to burn in her soul.

oOoOoOo

**Castle Wyvern**

_9:30pm_

By the time nine o'clock had come 'round, Lexington had already been put to work pulling whatever news clips he could find from the Internet. He had at least five screens all displaying different information and images at any one time. Broadway and Angela had offered to help as well, but Goliath had told them to take Bronx and investigate the labs that had burned down, to see what clues could be offered there. Broadway, ever the amateur detective, had brightened and hurried off to fetch his investigating kit with Angela trailing behind him.

Xanatos made an appearance ten minutes past the hour, with a bulging stack of paper clippings and what his own sources had been able to gather during the day while the clan was locked in their stone sleep. Goliath had accepted his offerings with grace and civility, and then Xanatos had quietly withdrawn, pausing only to say that the full resources of his family were at the clan's disposal.

For all intents and purposes, the man really did seem determined to prove he had turned over a new leaf. That still didn't mean Brooklyn trusted him though. Xanatos would find some way to weasel out of the life debt he owed the clan for saving his son from Oberon sooner or later. It was only a matter of time.

He flipped through his portion of the pile of files and photographs Xanatos had managed to get his hands on, propping his chin up with his free hand. None of the numbers and analyses made much sense to him, and oftentimes the images were too grainy to make out any details. It was just as likely a blob on the camera lens as it was a gargoyle, he thought. Some of them were _that_ hard to make out.

"Six gargoyles," Lexington said suddenly, breaking Brooklyn out of his inner grumbling. His head snapped around and he stood up, tossing the pages in his hand down onto the table with little regard. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Goliath and Hudson mark their places in their own research piles and approach the computer setup where Lexington was perched.

"Six, ye say?" Hudson stroked his beard as he bent in to peer with his one good eye at the computer screen. Lexington nodded, moved the mouse around and clicked it, then tapped the screen as a video began to play. It was footage of the fire, with indistinct shapes

"This is as clean as I can get the footage," he explained by way of apology. "It's really hard to make out any details, but then again, it usually is when it comes to gargoyles and hand cameras." He bent over the keyboard, tongue tucked intently in the corner of his mouth, and inputted several keystrokes. Red boxes began appearing on the video, and Lexington did something or another with them to make each display on its own screen.

"This is about as zoomed in as I can get," he continued, and Hudson nodded as if he understood every word coming out of Lexington's mouth. The olive-skinned gargoyle pointed to the first, where a bulky, pixilated shape reminiscent of Goliath was plucking what was obviously a human out of the path of the fire. Another blurry shape, small and web-winged, did the same on another screen. It was the same for all four, figures that looked like gargoyles but definitely were not any of the clan pulling humans out of the way of the rampaging blaze caused by the lab explosion.

"I ran recognition software on each figure," Lex said, finally turning around in his chair to face the others. "None of them match any gargoyle living in Manhattan today. Not the clan, not Talon's clan in the Labyrinth, not Demona or the clones… I even checked the records we got from some of the other clans around the world. London and Ishimura, primarily. Some of them are similar to clan members we have in the database… but none of them match enough to actually probably _be _that clan member."

Brooklyn got lost somewhere around the part where he was talking about Talon's people under the city streets, and he tried to puzzle it out on his own. His best guess was: "So you're saying that these gargoyles, if they really are gargoyles and I'm not just going out of my mind, are brand new to the city, that no one's seen them before last night?"

Lexington shot his brother a glance that was so full of guilt it was hard to meet the smaller gargoyle's eyes. "Well… not exactly. We did get one clear image from last night. I really had to dig for it though." He spun around to type at the keyboard again, and the central screen switched to the very clear, very distinct, image of an female gargoyle with long brown hair and dusky green skin. In the picture, she was lifting a fallen steel beam off a man in a lab technician's coat.

Hudson exclaimed something, and Goliath uttered "Jalapeño!" but Brooklyn paid them no attention. He stared at the for a long time, before finally reaching out to touch the screen with one trembling hand. "Greenskin," he said hoarsely. "My nightingale."

"I owe you an apology," Lexington said softly.

Brooklyn shook his head, still staring at the image. "Not important," he said. "What's important is that we find her. _And _the others. We need to know how they got here. Who brought them back. _Why _they were brought back."

"I agree," Goliath said, hands and arms arranged in his classic thinker's pose. "There are many questions that must be answered, and we can only do that by finding our lost clanmates, if they truly are our lost clanmates." He nodded decisively. "Brooklyn, you and Hudson will go to the last place you saw the female. Lexington, you've done excellent work tonight. You should stay here and see what more you can find."

Brooklyn glanced at Hudson, then nodded to Goliath. It was the most logical place to begin looking, since Broadway, Angela and Bronx were already searching the wreckage for clues. Lexington grinned up at the Clan Leader and cracked his knuckles. "I'm on it boss," he promised, and turned to give the array of display screens his full attention once again.

"If she's out there," Goliath said to Brooklyn in a reassuring tone, clapping one massive hand on his shoulder, "we'll find her. We'll find them all."


	5. 4: Nightingale, Part IV

**Gargoyles: the Resurrection**

**Nightingale, Part IV**

_**Previously, on Gargoyles:**_

Her panic swelled again until it mirrored the sound of rock breaking, falling, being smashed, and she couldn't control it. Deep within her frozen sleep-state, she fought like an animal to be free, before the same happened to her.

----

The green gargoyle sat up, and her eyes flashed white around the edges. In the backsplash of light, Brooklyn caught sight of silver jewelry at left wrist, right ankle, throat and upper right arm, dark leathers and green skin. High cheekbones and claw-tipped wings.

He reeled backwards, hands coming up and denials spilling from his mouth. "No," he breathed. "You're dead..."

**----**

"I'm Father O'Brien. Robert," the human added, then took a cautious step forward. The hand he'd been holding up to show he was unarmed extended out towards her. "You look in pain. Perhaps I can help."

----

"If she's out there," Goliath said to Brooklyn in a reassuring tone, clapping one massive hand on his shoulder, "we'll find her. We'll find them all."

oOoOoOoOo

_**Church of St. Michael the Archangel**_

_**Manhattan, New York**_

_8:05pm_

Nightingale sat on a stool in the kitchen, watching Father Robert moving around in what was obviously his domain, portioning out the roast chicken dinner he'd prepared. She was very carefully keeping her tail wrapped around one of the legs, her wings tucked very tightly to her body, and her hands firmly clasped in her lap. She cringed inwardly as she thought again of the vase she'd knocked over and broken when Father Robert's cat had startled her, and her wings flared on instinct.

Father Robert only laughed and told her that it was a hideous piece he only kept because his brother's wife thought it might look nice in the entry, and it wouldn't be missed too badly. But from the look in his eye, the vase had meant a bit more to him than just a thing he was obligated to show in case family came over. Nightingale didn't ask, and Father Robert didn't elaborate as he swept the pieces into a dustpan and laid them aside.

She still felt badly about it though, and as such, was keeping her wings, tail and hands to herself.

"I hope you like chicken," Father Robert said, passing her a bowl of something he called "mashed potatoes". She stared down at the lumpy white substance doubtfully, feeling the heat of the bowl through her talons. She resisted the urge to poke it to see if it felt as gooey as it looked. "Would you put those on the table, my dear?" Father Robert continued, already turning around to spoon vegetables from the pot on the stove into another bowl.

She carefully turned and set the bowl on the table beside the platter of chicken, then just as carefully withdrew her hands and set them back in her lap. A flicker of furtive motion from beneath the tablecloth caught her attention, and she tilted her head to peer beneath it. The grizzled black and white cat she so violently met in the hall glared back out at her, ears back and tail lashing. "Does your church have mice?" she inquired, hesitantly reaching towards the cat, which hissed softly in response and swiped at her talons.

"Hm?" Father Robert glanced over his shoulder and smiled gently when he saw her pulling her hand back. "Oh. No, no mice in the walls. Even if there were, I doubt Obadiah there would be much help getting rid of them. His sight isn't the best anymore, even with corrective surgeries." He paused, and hobbled to the table without his cane, hands full of more dishes. "Just feed him a bit of chicken, and you'll be his friend forever. He's a sucker for poultry."

Nightingale speared a single slice of chicken and carefully shredded it, eying the cat doubtfully. Obadiah eyed her right back, totally nonplussed, tail still lashing away. She held out a small strip to the cat, ready to pull back when he pounced. Obadiah sniffed at the meat, daintily plucked it from her talons, and leapt from the chair into her lap, batting gently at her hand and mewling for more as if they'd been friends for years.

Father Robert chuckled as he finally finished what he was doing at the stove and limped back to the table with one final bowl of a thick, brown, delicious-smelling liquid. "See? What did I tell you? Why don't you have a seat here, my dear--" and he indicated a chair, which Nightingale obligingly moved to, "—and I'll fix you up a plate."

There was a bad moment or two right at the beginning when she fumbled with the eating implements beside the plate, until Father Robert patiently showed her how to use the "fork" and "knife". They ate in companionable silence for a few minutes, Nightingale delighting to discover that mashed potatoes, once covered with the brown liquid, tasted far better than its appearance would have indicated. Obadiah remained in Nightingale's lap, head between her chest and the table, ready to steal bits of food that slipped from her fork.

Father Robert was the first to break the silence, setting aside his utensils and taking a sip of tea. "It isn't often I have company for dinner," he said, and smiled across the table at her. "I feel rather blessed to share this meal with a friend. I'm glad you're here."

"Are we friends?" The moment she said it, she knew it sounded rude. Heat rose to her cheeks and she ducked her head in embarrassment. "I didn't mean that to sound like that."

Father Robert chuckled. "I understand, I think," he said. "Your kind has met with a great deal of mistrust in the media of late, and the Quarrymen certainly aren't helping you out either, with their campaigns of hate and prejudice."

Nightingale frowned in confusion, absently rubbing Obadiah's ears. Nothing he said was making any sense. "I... don't understand. Media? My kind?"

Father Robert blinked. "Surely you're not the only one in the city," he said in surprise. "The stories say as many as eight or nine gargoyles at a time have been sighted, mostly downtown at that Aerie Building."

"I... I don't know, Father." She rubbed her temple against the sudden throb of pain that lanced through her forehead. "I... Everything is so confused. I... I can't remember much. Just pieces, and none of them make any sense. Fire, machines, men in white coats. A castle overlooking the sea. A feast, this church. It all just runs together."

She stared at the tablecloth, tears of frustration and confusion pricking at her eyes, so intent on avoiding any looks of pity or disgust she might see in her newfound friend's eyes that she nearly jumped a mile when he gently laid his hand atop hers.

"The important thing is that you're safe here," Father Robert said, and the compassion in his voice nearly made those tears spill over. He chuckled when she looked up, startled, and met his eyes. "Were you expecting judgement?" he asked gently.

A little embarrassed, she bit her lip and nodded. "It isn't natural, memory loss," she said quietly. "I know that much. There must be something wrong with me, that I can't remember anything but bits that don't fit together."

"Oh, my dear," Father Robert said, and gently squeezed her hand. "There's nothing wrong with you at all."

"There is," she insisted. "It isn't normal to not know anything."

Father Robert closed his eyes for a brief moment, then opened them again, and there was a very faraway gleam to them. "A long time ago," he said, "I was in a war that did terrible things to good men. Nowadays, they call it post-traumatic stress disorder, but back then, there wasn't much help for anyone who suffered it. And those good men were more or less abandoned by the people they were trying to protect." He smiled, a little sadly. "Thankfully, we're in different times now, and people know a lot more about things that happen after traumatic experiences. If you've lost your memory, Nightingale, it's not because you're crazy, or because there's something wrong with you. It's because you've suffered something traumatic, and the memory loss is just your mind's way of coping while it heals itself."

She blinked, slowly puzzling out the point he was trying to make. "You think things will eventually make sense? My memories will start coming back?"

"I'm sure it will, but it might take some time." He patted her hand, then picked up the bowl of gravy and ladled more sauce over his potatoes. "I'll keep it in my prayers, how's that?"

Despite herself, she smiled, thinking of another holy man with a bad leg and a crutch. "Brother Mathias used to pray for my soul," she said. "He never gave up on me."

"And neither will I," Father Robert said. "Who is Brother Mathias?"

"He's one of those random bits of memory," she said, following Father Robert's example and returning to her own meal as she spoke. "He was a monk in the castle by the sea. I liked him very much, even though I get the feeling that he exasperated me sometimes. He had a bad leg that ached in the rain, and he couldn't walk without his crutch." She strained for any other scrap of memory, but the low throb in the front of her head warned her off. She rubbed at her temple again with a faint grimace. "That's all I really remember of him."

"That's something, isn't it?"

When she thought about it like that, she realized he was right, and despite herself she smiled faintly. "I suppose it is." She dropped her gaze to her half-eaten dinner, and resolutely forked more of the potatoes into her mouth. "This is rather good," she said after swallowing.

Father Robert smiled blissfully. "Thank you," he said. "Eat up, dear, for there's hot apple pie for dessert."

oOoOoOoOo

_**Ruins of Majix Technologies **_

_**Manhattan, New York**_

_11:30pm_

"Do you believe it?" Angela said, then grunted as she picked up a steel door that was heavier than it looked. She cast about for a safe place to toss it, found one, and heaved with precision that would have done her father proud. It landed on its side in the lab behind them, next to the mangled remains of some machine or another, before teetering and tipping flat with a loud _bang_.

Broadway rummaged through his investigator's kit, really little more than a backpack filled with odds and ends he thought would help him on cases, and triumphantly held aloft a flashlight. "Did I remember to put in fresh batteries?" he muttered to himself. He fiddled with the device for a moment, and then grinned as it obediently turned on. "Yes, I did!"

Angela turned over another door, this one in five pieces, and gingerly tested the footing below it. The ground shifted disturbingly, creakingly, and Angela wisely drew her foot back from that spot. "Broadway?"

Broadway glanced over at her then, as if he'd only now heard her ask the question. "Oh! Uh... I don't know, Angela. Seems pretty out there, you know?"

"This coming from a gargoyle that slept in stone for a thousand years," she said drily. "Who's speaking to another gargoyle that grew up on a magical island with fairies."

"Yeah, but that's magic. I get magic. Gargoyles coming back from the dead? It's like something out of those cheesy movies Brooklyn likes so much."

Angela sighed as Broadway ignored her waving for him to come help her. It wasn't that he wasn't interested in helping. It was just that a mystery like this excited him to the point where he was very easily distracted by any bit of evidence he thought he found. Still, she really wished he'd stop peering about and help. She braced herself and pushed, wincing as a jagged spike of metal scraped across her shoulder when the thing toppled free, leaving a clear space. "You know, I could really use some help with this."

Broadway shone the flashlight this way and that, with no discernable pattern Angela could find, though from the expression on his face, she assumed he had one. Brow ridges furrowed in concentration, Broadway moved through the space she'd just cleared and looked further down with the help of his flashlight. "I think someone went through here recently," he said. "After the fire, but before us. I don't think we're going to find much to go on."

Angela grasped the side of one particularly cumbersome bank of machinery awkwardly skewed in the confines of the corridor and gestured for him to get the other side. "How can you tell?" He didn't answer and, still frowning, set a hand on the metal. But he didn't dig in and lift when she did like she expected him to. She bit back a growl of frustration as the machine lifted three inches and dropped back down, narrowly missing her talons. "Broadway?"

"Nothing here fell right," he said, and tapped a talon against the top of the slagged metal. "If this had been thrown by the blast, it's heavy enough to have gone through the walls, even if they're reinforced." He glanced over his shoulder at her with a tiny grin. "Which they are. I checked. There aren't even any marks on the walls where it might have impacted."

She gave up on moving the barrier anytime soon and just leaned on it with her elbows. She had never felt so grimy and unclean in her life, and her shoulder hurt where the wood had scratched it. Longingly, she thought of the hot showers back at the castle, and wondered if they'd get back in time for her to have one before dawn came. "So?"

"So," he said. "That means someone _put _it here. Deliberately. And I'd bet my magnifying glass that _all_ of this rubble was put here, to block off this corridor from anyone poking around down here."

Angela frowned and looked around at all the junk. For the life of her, she couldn't tell the difference between deliberately placed barricades and debris thrown by an explosion. It all looked randomly placed to her. Though, she supposed, that might have been the point. "Okay," she said slowly. "So someone here had something to hide. So what do we do now?"

Broadway grinned, his fangs startlingly white against the grime plastering his skin. "So we move this wreckage, and see what's further down the corridor," he declared, then dug his talons into the machine like she'd wanted him to five minutes ago. "C'mon! What are you waiting for?"

Angela closed her eyes and counted to ten in time with Broadway's audible efforts to move the obstruction. When she opened them again, it was in time to see a midnight-blue fist fly out of the shadows behind the machine bank and crack across Broadway's cheek with enough force to send him flying halfway down the corridor.

oOoOoOoOo

_**Castle Wyvern**_

_**Manhattan, New York**_

_1:00am_

Lexington hadn't wanted to open his mouth, _especially _since his callous dismissal of Brooklyn's story about meeting his dead girlfriend on a rooftop on the lower East Side. More than twenty-four hours later, and he was _still _cringing over that. Couldn't even grit a path with her indeed. Maybe he'd been spending too much time immersed in his video games lately, talking to barely pubescent human males who seemed to delight in trying to shock others with their metaphors and expletives. He'd find some way to make it up to Brooklyn, no matter what it took.

Since everyone had departed from the castle, Lexington had been hard at work, not just pulling up more information – scant though that was – from the depths of the Internet and the various news sites he managed to hack into, but also refining the images, trying to clear up the pixilation and extract more details. It was hard going, he hadn't been kidding when he told the Goliath and the others that gargoyles and shaky hand-cams didn't mix well. But Xanatos had access to some really top-end editing programs, stuff that hadn't even hit the market yet, and once Lexington had wheedled his way into access (though truth be told, it wasn't as hard as he thought it would be; maybe Xanatos really _was_ going soft), everything went much quicker.

Finally, after hours of tweaking colors and removing random noise, he had the images as clear as a bell, and every single instinct he had was clamouring that he _should _have said something before the others had separated for their assignments.

No one else said anything about the new gargoyles, despite having grainy photos to go on. No one had commented on how familiar they all seemed, in their shapes and their movements, when motion images were available. But an unpleasant feeling had settled into Lexington's gut from the moment he'd first seen the still of Brooklyn's Nightingale, and it only grew worse as the rest came clear, gargoyles he recognized from memories of the original Wyvern clan still painful and fresh.

"Dammit," he swore, and hopped out of his swivel chair to retrieve the stack of printed stills from the printer. He sorted through them, cursed again, and took them over to the corkboard where he'd pinned other images and articles as he found them. One by one, he posted them up with pushpins, right next to all the notes he'd made after the fact about Nightingale's confusion, fear, panic and apparent memory issues. There was no way to know if any of the other resurrected gargoyles suffered the same problems, but had the clan known in advance, they might have been able to prepare for it, instead of possibly being caught off guard. And the clan had gone off without any of them, Lexington included, remembering – or possibly trusting – the communications headsets provided to them by Xanatos.

Glumly, he returned to the bank of computers and hunched over the keyboard to monitor the news networks. He should have said something, dammit. He should have said something.

oOoOoOoOo

**Ruins of Majix Technologies**

Angela ducked the massive fist coming towards her and desperately threw herself to the side as an equally massive tail slammed down, burying a club of bone the size of her head into the spot she'd just been standing. Insanely, she thought of all those dinosaur toys Alexander was so fond of as the gargoyle stepped into the sputtering beam of Broadway's fallen flashlight, revealing a form only slightly less hulking than Goliath's, with a wicked set of horns curling from his head and a double row of plates curving over his limbs and tail.

Big Blue didn't make a sound as he kept coming. Not a grunt of effort, not a single roar so instinctual to a fighting gargoyle. No trash talk, no taunts to unnerve her. His face was slack and emotionless. His white eyes glowed blankly, like the TV screen after Broadway finished watching his movies. The lights were on, but there was no one home.

The thought of Broadway snapped her back to the reality of the situation, and she threw a quick glance in her companion's direction. But he still lay where he'd landed, a crumpled aquamarine heap that was, thankfully, still breathing. A glancing blow sent her reeling with her ears ringing, firmly returning her attention to Big Blue.

"Stop! I am not your enemy!" she shouted frantically, then had to throw herself completely flat and cover her head as Big Blue whirled with a speed that belied his bulk and struck at her again with that tail of his, then rolled as a follow-up strike with a ham-sized fist smashed through the floor where her head had just been. She caught the trailing edge of her left wing on a jagged jut of steel from the debris still on the floor, tearing through the delicate membrane in a hot line of pain, quickly replaced by the equally hot surge of rage that followed in its wake.

She swung a punch, a textbook perfect uppercut she'd used many times on various criminals and lowlifes. Normally, whoever she hit would crumple like a paper bag, eyes rolling back in their skulls and knees giving out. When her fist hit Big Blue, however, there was no eye-rolling or boneless crumpling. His head snapped back, and he staggered backwards a single pace. Angela's hand felt like she'd grabbed hold of a supercharged Quarryman hammer. His return blow drove her a good fifteen feet down the hall, to land in a painful tangle of wings, tail and detritus beside Broadway.

Her rage deserted her as suddenly as it had come, and suddenly, she wanted nothing more than to run away, find a dark corner to crawl into where Big Blue wouldn't find her and wait for the dawn to claim her in stone sleep. Fear was not an emotion Angela was particularly comfortable with it. She was the daughter of Goliath of Wyvern, for the Dragon's sake! Child of Demona, arguably insane but unquestionably fearless. She was made of sterner stuff than this, and had proved as much over and over again in battle. She had nothing to fear from a mere fight.

But this was no mere fight, and she forced herself to take an objective look at it. The corridor was too narrow and cluttered for her to take advantage of her superior speed and slighter build. The ceiling was too low for her to climb out of Big Blue's reach, and the walls were thick and reinforced, so she had no great hope to tear through. She was injured, and Broadway was still out of commission, though it sounded like he was finally starting to come around.

Angela gritted her teeth. Though she hated like hell to do it, it was definitely time to run.

She sank her talons into the heavy steel door she'd tossed aside a lifetime ago and hurled it down the hall with a shriek of exertion. Big Blue had to see it coming, but he didn't duck or try to dodge at all. He just kept plodding towards her, with that creepy vacant expression still firmly plastered on his face.

She didn't wait to see the impact the door would have on Big Blue. The second it had left her grasp, she was by Broadway's side, hurriedly reaching down to help get him back on his feet. He peered at her cross-eyed, holding one side of his head. "Angela?" he mumbled. "Wha's goin' on?"

"No time!" she said, ducking under his arm to physically drag him down the hall and away from their eerily silent attacker if need be. "We need to go! Now!"

To his credit, he didn't argue or ask questions or even try to fish up the scattered bits of his investigator's kit. He merely hobbled down the hall, leaning heavily on Angela until his legs could support him properly.

Every few steps, Angela glanced anxiously over her shoulder, worried that the huge blue gargoyle was coming after them. But she saw no sign of him until they were well out of the corridor, back into the better-lit sections of the ruins, and then it was only his blazing eyes, watching them from the depths of the shadows before the light faded away and left only impenetrable shadows.

"Can you fly?" Angela asked Broadway, and the aquamarine gargoyle gave a brisk shake of his head and carefully pushed away from her to try standing on his own two feet. A sizeable lump had formed on his jaw, and the skin around it was already darkening into a spectacular bruise that had to hurt like hell.

"My ears are ringing, but I think so," he said, carefully stretching his wings to their full extension and inspecting them for damage. "How about you? Are you alright?"

Angela shook her head, and ever so cautiously lifted her left wing. The motion brought fresh, sharp twinges of pain, and she hissed in a breath before folding it around her body again. "No," she admitted. "Do you think you could manage both of us?"

"I think so," he said again, and looked back down the hall. "Man, what _was _that?"

"I have no idea," Angela replied truthfully. "But I don't think it's safe to explore down that hallway without more of us here."

"Agreed," Broadway replied, and shook his head briskly again. He held out his arms to Angela, and she moved into them. "It'll be dawn soon. Let's just get back to the castle and let the others know what happened. Goliath can decide what to do next."

oOoOoOoOo

_**Church of St. Michael the Archangel**_

**Near Dawn**

The rooftop from the night before had been a complete wash, despite Brooklyn and Hudson's best efforts to find any lead on where the green gargoyle might have gone. There were talon marks to bear witness to the fact that she'd been here, but there was nothing to indicate where she went. After awhile, all the rooftops started to blend together, and no matter how many he landed on, none of them gave him what he wanted.

"This is pointless!" he snarled, closing his talons around the edge of their current rooftop, a church ringed with carved statues. The stone crumbled under his grip with a dim crunch. "I know she was here!"

Hudson straightened from his crouch, turning over a stone shard in his hands. "A gargoyle slept here, fair recently," he said. "Could be yuir lass."

Brooklyn sighed. "Yeah, could be. Could be one of the clones, or Demona even. But chances are, whoever it was, they've already moved on again."

"The sun's coming up soon," Hudson said, with an eye to the east. "We should be getting back to the castle before we're caught beyond its walls." He clapped a hand reassuringly on Brooklyn's shoulder. "We can pick up the search again from here when the sun sets, lad."

"Yeah," Brooklyn muttered, knowing that every day that passed only made it more unlikely they'd find her before people like the Quarrymen did. "We'll try again tomorrow night."

Moments after they leapt into the winds and climbed far above the skyline, a door nearly hidden behind the statue of an angel opened, and two figures stepped out, one with wings, the other leaning on a cane.

oOoOoOoOo

**To Be Concluded**


End file.
